An interesting meditation over at Samizdat blog, from which future Professor Corey pulls the tagline "Disinterest is modernity."
That seems about right as a summary; the argument runs, in more detail (and with some intriguing digressions) that the pivotal quality that determines subjects Western modernity is disinterest and gessellschaft—of setting aside personal interests and convictions in a society of abstract, contractual relations. It makes for a very split self (the part of me with real convictions, and the part of me that performs a social role according to ethics determined by that role alone). This separation allows/produces behaviors good and bad, examples freely given. In short: impartiality of care, probably good; versions of "I was just doing my job," bad. Either way, it requires a divided consciousness, a separation between "feeling" and "understanding," the source of which turns out to be "good taste":
The interesting thing to me is this: the idea of disinterest in the West begins to come into being in the 18th century, and it begins in discussions of taste. It travels into the realms of politics, institutions, corporations, and professional ethics [...], but it begins with taste and aesthetics. You don’t really get it as a part of ethics until after you get it as a part of aesthetics....
There's something frustrating about Samizdat's acccount, even as it seems smart and useful. The frustration lies in the way history is narrated, so that the cause for a bunch of powerful, potentially useful and destructive ideas turns out to be another idea. Locating the appearance of this separation of thought we're calling "disinterest" is useful. But history simply can't be told in such a way that thoughts always come from other thoughts; this approach is literally non-sensical (albeit occasionally convivial to folks who think for a living); effects without causes.
Whether or not the conditions of a place and time cause people to have ideas can remain up for debate. Yet few doubt that such conditions have a pretty influential—even determinate—effect on whether ideas take root and flower. No ideas but in things, and that goes for history too—when people speak of "materialism" they mean nothing other than its thingness, in the exact same sense meant by Dr. Williams.
How then might we return to thingness, to material life, the history of this idea (which is, finally, of a piece with that skepticism about the Enlightenment crystallized in the critique of instrumental reason). What relations were changing that might fructify this changed idea? Adorno offers at least one idea that seems no less worth entertaining for its simplicity, and has as well useful implications for debates about the nature of poetry, and the ideology of MFA programs (always hot topics in this corner of the blogosphere).
Intelligence is a moral category, he writes in Minima Moralia, warming to his analysis. The separation of feeling and understanding, that makes it possible to absolve and beatify the blockhead, hypostatizes the dismemberment of man into functions.
One sees immediately the response this makes to the ongoing debate about the status of "theory" in poetry, which is itself a high-level recapitulation of the workshop distinction between brains and heart in a poem. Adorno's point is that pursuing the right ratio of "thought" and "feeling," or of "theory" and "life," is a fool's errand; meanwhile, the move it requires—separating out the categories in the first place—is a deadening calculus that does nothing but replicate the logic of the division of labor.
But Adorno isn't writing about poetry. He's writing about, you know, moral minimums; that is, he is making account of exactly what Samizdat has been meditating upon, of late. And has managed, in his turn, to locate the separation in question within history's thingness—particularly, the ways in which a being is turned increasingly into a divisible thing, as part of a clearly nameable process that comes to permeate all social life, from ethics to poetry.
Posted by jane at December 22, 2005 01:21 PM | TrackBack